Stories, poetry & general musings of Rebecca Haywood, a modern-day Shaman with a penchant for bringing the divine into the human experience.

Confession: I am divine and I am human. I am all of it. I am woman. I am little girl. I am sex. I am purity. I am none of it. I am infinite in finite envelopes with names and places assigned.
But what is my address? Who do you address in this dress, ...these shoes that stumble that sparkle that carry me home somehow, again, awake and wanting him and Him, human...More

Bloom early Endlessly Tufted rainbow hues of you Shamelessly scented With life For life Attracting more life Eating more light Full Filling Unwieldy beauty Unyielding beauty For they dare not pluckThey dare not f*ck How can they? Take what is not the...irs? Shake what is not loose? These petals command the windAnd rise the tides No time to stop This bloom made the sun
————— Let’s stop hiding, shall we? Let’s stop trading...More

The fight response presents in the mind. The energy is guarded, controlled, and sharp with pride. The trauma self stands her ground. No longer frozen or running from fear, she raises her sword at the ready to take on the battle. She seems triumphant—...a warrior to be lauded—but the only one sliced by her blade now is herself. For the real battle is done—the enemy slain, arraigned or waned—and yet she keeps fighting,...More

The flight response presents in the emotional aspect: the energy is flowing but erratic. The frozen self may have thawed enough to move but only laterally— flitting back and forth between emotional coping mechanisms. One might think that this flight ...is purely based in fear but remember, we are talking about the trauma self’s resistance to being embraced by You, the guardian, and in this case, to being felt. She isn’t just fleeing...More

Yesterday, I flipped the conversation about our resistance to healing and embracing our trauma self into an exploration of how the trauma self resists that embrace, even from You, the guardian. I introduced a new framework for identifying her resista...nce—the freeze, flee, or fight response. I shared that my trauma self has resisted my embrace in these three ways and cycled through them, just as she did when the trauma first occurred.
I...More

My last few posts addressed the rebellion against our trauma self and this “walking in two worlds” medicine. Next up: resistance manifest and how our trauma self freezes, flees, or fights the “essential embrace”.
As a healer, I understood the manif...estation of one’s resistance to be based on density. The longer and stronger it was held, the more physical it would become—moving from a spiritual disconnect to a mental one, then emotional, and...More

Imagine...your life as a patchwork quilt...spread out before you... spread out within you... every moment of your life... and each version of You within them... child unborn and child emerged... teenager uncertain and rebelled... adult assured and th...en felled... victim, survivor, lover of love... guardian, elder, and spirit returned... all together... here, now... connected as one continuous being... one heart... one soul... one You... to love, to honor, to be.
Imagine them all...More

“Shameless Feminine”
Beloved, I come to you now,Pulled by your sleeping scarlet dreams,Your flowers of yearning,Your earth’s turning,
That I may reach into this vessel —Beyond feast of ghost and Pain possessing pleasure— And bend my love into you, Be...come your trestle,
Till you rise upon my kisses And your light breaks only into dawn— Never a slave To their empty grave No more. - Rh...More

“It’s not worth prosecuting”, I was told after the detective had “lost” all the evidence. Evidence plucked, swabbed, and stripped from my shaking body—gone, and with it—my credibility. Even before that, the same detective had attempted to silence me ...with his shaming inquisition. And now it seemed he had won. But he hadn’t. I wouldn’t let him.
The way that I won, in spite of him, had nothing to do with spite at...More

The blankets of the sweat lodge had begun to move with the cool breeze of the desert night, bringing my awareness back to my body. I lay there in the darkness alone; the ground wet with the steam of sage and copal. I was in the primordial... mud; in the stillness of the beginning of it all.
The Temazcal, once filled with song and prayer, had carried me to a deep place...More

Happy Summer Solstice everyone!
This image reminds me of a cherished painting of my abuelita, Madre Sarita. It depicted the Eye of Providence with the all-seeing eye radiating within a pyramid. (Do you see the eye here?!) I loved that painting and spent hours meditating upon it.
For me, it represented the eye of the dreamer—mine and that of the divine infinite—and it opened my spiritual eyes to see beyond form and into...

On this Memorial Day, as we honor those who have died serving our country, let us remember them well. For how we remember them, in a sense, is how they are resurrected within us and our life.
“They live on in us.” We say these words, but we don’t quite give them the credence they deserve. They do live on in us. Through our memories, their living moments are given breath again. Their...

Confession: I am divine and I am human. I am all of it. I am woman. I am little girl. I am sex. I am purity. I am none of it. I am infinite in finite envelopes with names and places assigned.
But what is my address? Who do you address in this dress, these shoes that stumble that sparkle that carry me home somehow, again, awake and wanting him and Him, human...

Bloom early Endlessly Tufted rainbow hues of you Shamelessly scented With life For life Attracting more life Eating more light Full Filling Unwieldy beauty Unyielding beauty For they dare not pluckThey dare not f*ck How can they? Take what is not theirs? Shake what is not loose? These petals command the windAnd rise the tides No time to stop This bloom made the sun
————— Let’s stop hiding, shall we? Let’s stop trading...

I am a huntress of medicine. I stalk out a need within myself or a client and then I ask Spirit to bring on the alchemy. At times, it is like a treasure hunt where one clue leads to another in an unfolding journey that requires patience and surrender.
That’s how it has been this last month with the personal trauma work that I have been sharing with y’all. I had stalled out,...

The Earth laughs in flowers. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thank you Ralph. And thank you Mother. I have such gratitude for the beauty of this Earth and all that She inspires. She has always been my greatest teacher and friend— my secret church and the riverbed for my tears. She has been speaking to me and through me since I was a child, as I believe She does with every human, every living...

I awoke last night before my usual witching hour of 3am. I had crashed early, happily exhausted, and found the midnight chime to be my time. I lit my candles, said my prayers, and swiftly disappeared into a wordless dream that enveloped my mind— empty and yet saturated like the invisible aroma of flowers in the air.
Though beautiful and sweet, it left me restless and wanting— my body hot with the energy...

In light of Notre Dame, I thought I would share this piece I wrote a while back about my “secret church” and its ‘demise’. Perhaps it will offer some comfort to those feeling the loss of their sacred site. Perhaps they will feel the loss, like I did, as an expansion and return to the essence from which it came... and to which called us there in the first place. All things fade...

Meditation came alive for me when I let go of the obligation to silence my mind and instead chose to direct my mind into the meditation.
Let’s face it; the mind’s habit is to talk. It has been talking to you, at you, about you, for however many years you have been speaking. So what makes you think it is suddenly going to hush up now that you have chosen to seek inner...

Fence?I am the fence! And my lines Bend time And wildIt all away.
Lately my walking meditations have been much like those of my childhood—listening without a question in my heart. It has been nice to return to this place of simply receiving the medicine of the moment, without the prayers that so often lead these walks.
It draws me back to my training days with Sarita and our practice of channeling—just her...

“I am here!”
This has been my mantra for the last couple weeks. It is one that I have used with myself and clients in the past yet with less of a declaration and more of a loving presence. I would place my hand on my heart or wherever my emotional pain had landed and coo, “I am here. I got you.” My clients would report how effective this simple act of self-love...

The fight response presents in the mind. The energy is guarded, controlled, and sharp with pride. The trauma self stands her ground. No longer frozen or running from fear, she raises her sword at the ready to take on the battle. She seems triumphant—a warrior to be lauded—but the only one sliced by her blade now is herself. For the real battle is done—the enemy slain, arraigned or waned—and yet she keeps fighting,...

The flight response presents in the emotional aspect: the energy is flowing but erratic. The frozen self may have thawed enough to move but only laterally— flitting back and forth between emotional coping mechanisms. One might think that this flight is purely based in fear but remember, we are talking about the trauma self’s resistance to being embraced by You, the guardian, and in this case, to being felt. She isn’t just fleeing...

Yesterday, I flipped the conversation about our resistance to healing and embracing our trauma self into an exploration of how the trauma self resists that embrace, even from You, the guardian. I introduced a new framework for identifying her resistance—the freeze, flee, or fight response. I shared that my trauma self has resisted my embrace in these three ways and cycled through them, just as she did when the trauma first occurred.
I...

My last few posts addressed the rebellion against our trauma self and this “walking in two worlds” medicine. Next up: resistance manifest and how our trauma self freezes, flees, or fights the “essential embrace”.
As a healer, I understood the manifestation of one’s resistance to be based on density. The longer and stronger it was held, the more physical it would become—moving from a spiritual disconnect to a mental one, then emotional, and...

What opens the door within oneself? ...to peer beyond the veils of protection that we placed in front of our trauma? …to pierce the heavy silence, the frozen fear, its secrets, its shame? ...and to do this walk that I and so many of us are on, or wish to be on— this walking in both worlds with our trauma self finally risen from shadow and with our guardian self at the ready...

I received so many response to my last post—about healing trauma and walking in two worlds: as the self needing to be healed, and as the one offering that healing—that I want to deepen the conversation, to invite you deeper into your process by sharing more of my own. So that’s what’s up this week and until Spirit (which includes you!) invites another topic to the table.
First up is this word used...

In my recent posts, I have been discussing a vision I received: a patchwork quilt which represented my life and all the selves within it, connected by a single golden thread—the one Self that flows through them all. It has delivered a big medicine for me and the healing of a hidden sexual trauma recently uncovered.
This has been the toughest piece of trauma work I have ever had to do because it...

Imagine...your life as a patchwork quilt...spread out before you... spread out within you... every moment of your life... and each version of You within them... child unborn and child emerged... teenager uncertain and rebelled... adult assured and then felled... victim, survivor, lover of love... guardian, elder, and spirit returned... all together... here, now... connected as one continuous being... one heart... one soul... one You... to love, to honor, to be.
Imagine them all...

I used to think of the Self as a layered being— layers of stories, beliefs, emotions. That is the language I was given to describe it and to process it— to peel away the layers.
Through my personal journey of healing trauma, I discovered the emotional “peeling“ to be more of an unwinding from the body. Each emotion was like a thread, spun by stories and bound with beliefs and, if I followed...